Gargoyles

LW and I looked at Cathedral yesterday, in preparation for our France trip. He was especially taken with the gargoyles and how the rainwater runs down the gutters and flows out of their mouths.

His swimming teacher was not quite as impressed with his imitation of a gargoyle during his lesson today.

Vie de France

Subtitled Sharing Food, Friendship, and a Kitchen in the Loire Valley, this book is essentially food porn.

The author, a former chef, spent a month in France with a group of friends, doing some sightseeing and a lot of cooking and eating. This book is a meal-by-meal description of the month. I salivated over every page. It was all I could do not to grab my passport and head for the airport.

And since Michael told me he'd like me to do some of the cooking in France, it was good to start thinking of shopping and cooking in a foreign country. Michael's a great fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants chef (his chicken noodle soup last night was divine), but I tend to be overly reliant on recipes and not very flexible. Two months of mental preparation is about right.

One funny note: I checked this book out from the library, and emblazoned across the front and back cover, it says, "Uncorrected Proofs for Limited Distribution. NOT FOR SALE."

The Princess of Cleves

Wanting to continue reading books about France, I scoured our shelves for something appropriate and found this book left from Michael's college days.

Once you get past the info dump on who was who in the court of Henri II, this is an easy read. Of course, I had Michael's margin notes to guide me: Important page. Theory of romantic love.

The Princess of Cleves is a woman faced with a dilemma: tell her husband she is in love with another man so he can help her avoid tempting situations? Or keep her love a secret and risk succumbing?

I think Anna Karenina would make a fascinating contrast, but my memories are twenty years old and far too fuzzy. I went so far as to pick my copy off the shelf, considering re-reading it. The sight of the 868 closely typewritten pages dissuaded me, and I put it back. I'm not quite that curious.

Snow!

Tuesday morning when I woke up, I could see grass in places. Grass. In February. In northern New England.


Wednesday morning, I woke up to this:






It snowed for the next fifteen hours, although the rate eased up at times. We ended up with around two feet, with a chance for more later this week.

And the phone rang off the hook. The guests who had reservations were cancelling them because of the driving conditions, while others were making new reservations to take advantage of the improved skiing conditions.

The Happiness Project

I found this book in a round-about way. The author has a blog, and Michael's cousin Lis linked to it from her blog a couple of months ago. I liked what I read, and meant to pre-order the book, but life intervened and it took me until February to actually get my hands on a copy.

I love self-improvement books--it's so much easier to vicariously improve yourself than to do the actual work of changing--and this was no exception. It's akin to The Year of Living Biblically, which I also enjoyed. (It turns out the authors know each other.)

Much of this book resonated with me, starting with the premise of the Happiness Project:

And more important, I didn't want to reject my life. I wanted to change my life without changing my life, by finding more happiness in my own kitchen. I knew I wouldn't discover happiness in a faraway place or in unusual circumstances; it was right here, right now. (p12)

I tend to be drawn to books and movies and music with that same central theme: Carpe Diem. Live deliberately. Dance.

Maybe I'm a slow learner.

The Count of Monte Cristo

Shortly after we were married, Michael discovered I had never read this book. Once he recovered from his shock, he urged me to read it. Sixteen years later, I decided it was finally time.

It's a very fun read.

Alexandre Dumas wrote it roughly twenty years before Victor Hugo wrote Les Miserables. Both are French novels with long time lines. Both involve one character pursuing another through the years.

But there the similarity ends.

The Count of Monte Cristo reads like a soap opera: jealousy, intrigue, disguise, murder, revenge, secret romance, fabulous wealth. The story is very plot-driven, and Dumas keeps the story moving at a modern pace. No fifty-page tangents here.

It's a good classic to give a young teen, and I plan to assign it to EM before our trip to France, but IM has asked to have a stab at it first.

Olympics snark

From tonight's TV Guide listing: In live action, U.S. men's curling faces France

Action? Has the writer ever seen curling? The Canadian women's team has an alternate player who is five months pregnant, for heaven's sake.

What a way to greet the morning

Awakened at 5:45 to a little voice saying, "Mommy, I have something to tell you. I vomited in the sink."

Thoughts on toe tapping

Our middle school has an excellent music program. I actually enjoy listening to the middle school band.

And yet . . .

It's a very different music program than I participated in during middle school and high school.

Someone--I believe it was Mr. Vicks, my orchestra teacher for fifth through eighth grades--drilled into us that there was no need to ever tap your shoe while playing. If you absolutely couldn't hold the beat internally, you could tap your toes inside your shoe. But the sole of your shoe should stay firmly planted on the floor at all times.

This is obviously not a belief shared by EM's band teachers.

Although I recognize that many of the rules that seemed inviolate to me as a teenager are not that important in the grand scheme of things, I must confess that a part of me spends the middle school concerts wishing I had a nail gun to drill the tapping shoes to the floor.

Just the tippy toes. I promise not to hit the feet.

Fun with the Girl Scout health history form

IM is joining the Girl Scouts. She's thrilled. She's wanted to join since kindergarten, but until last week, there wasn't a troop close enough to be feasible and she does not have the sort of mom willing to organize a troop.

So tonight I filled out the registration form and the Girl Health History Record. I'm generally pretty exact about forms like this. I answer all the questions, providing a titch too much information.

Not this form.

Since last health exam, has participant had

• a serious injury requiring medical attention? (If you receive medical attention, doesn't that become your last health exam?)
• any prescribed or over-the-counter meds? (Really? They really want to know that I gave her Tylenol for a fever in October and decongestant flying back from Oregon in August?)
• a surgical operation or fracture? (See earlier comment on medical attention)
• treatment in hospital or emergency room? (Ditto)
• any exposure to a contagious disease? (Nope. Not my child. She hasn't been exposed to the cold or flu since July. What? You don't believe me?)

And then there's the section on Other Health Conditions. These are all over the map, from wearing glasses to nosebleeds to fainting to immune disease. But the kicker is "Emotional Disturbances." They do realize they're talking about ten-year-old girls, right?

But I was good. I told them about her glasses and heart murmur and kept all snarky comments to myself, Michael, and all of you.

Still trying to figure out winter

LW, on being told it was time for swimming lessons: In the outdoor pool or the indoor pool?

Pretty as a picture

IM, riding in the car today: Mom, do they make lots of postcards of our state? Because if they don't they should. I mean, look at this!

An update on my "dentally delayed" son

I took EM to his third pre-braces consult with the orthodontist recommended by his dentist.

Of the five baby teeth he had in August, he'd only lost one. The orthodontist pulled two more in the process of wiggling them to see how loose they were. (EM was supposed to be wiggling these regularly, but it turns out he had grown confused about which ones he was supposed to be wiggling.)

The plan is to have the remaining two teeth pulled by the dentist asap. (Fortunately, they are in the same quadrant, so he'll only need one set of numbing shots.) Then we'll give his adult teeth some time to grow in and he'll go back to the orthodontist in May.

With any luck, he'll be in braces and headgear by June.

In the meantime, having seen the estimated bill, we're seeking a second opinion and estimate.